A travel hack step too far? How I used Google Translate to earn free reward points for hotel reviews!

Opportunities to earn points without actually travelling or using a credit card are fairly limited. Typically there are a few sources, the most notable being rewards for completing surveys. For example I’m currently subscribed to Opinion Rewards Club (https://www.opinionrewardsclub.co.uk/) and can earn a measly 10 Flying Blue points for 12 minutes of my time! Some survey sites which pay in points, such as e-rewards, can also only be accessed by invitation. Aside from this, there are also occasionally examples of limited time one-off promotions. The best of these at present being the Marriott ’29 Ways’ promotion, which (after some confusion when it launched) now gives all members the opportunity to return to earn points each day throughout the promotional period. This promotion can be accessed at https://29ways.marriott.com/ – most people are reporting slow and steady progress of 50 bonus points on most days, but I’ve actually had 2 lots of 1000 point wins.

However, I’d also heard that somewhere out there, there were opportunities to earn points for completing hotel reviews, and as I’m quite keen on both reviewing hotels and earning points I decided to do some research. This is where things got more complicated!

I did in fact find two sites where this was possible, however there was quite a big catch… it turned out that neither of these sites were accepting reviews written in English! The first was a Turkish site called Gezi, where points could be earned for Miles&Smiles. I had a go at accessing this, but quickly realised it was going to take significant time and effort to fathom how to use it. So I gave up. The second was a German site called ‘Holiday Check’, which proved to be much more accessible. Holiday Check allows you to earn 100 Lufthansa Miles & More points per review, and crucially (given that I don’t speak German!) reviews are relatively simple to complete. A good proportion of the review content is based on giving ratings, there are helpful icons and the review text section had a relatively low minimum character limit. So armed with Google Translate, I linked my Miles & More Account and decided to submit brief reviews of two hotels I’d recently used: the Conrad Algarve (featured in the image), and Hilton Vilamoura – to test whether I could get my translated reviews accepted. In both cases I entered a very basic overview of my experience, e.g. beautiful hotel, fantastic service, into Google Translate and then copied it into the review form.

Sure enough, just hours later I received two emails from Holiday Check (which I subsequently copied and pasted into Google Translate!), both confirming my reviews had been verified and published. A week or so later, I logged into my Miles & More Account and voila; two entries showing +100 pts appeared on my account. Strangely, my review also then got a response in English from the hotel!

The value of these Miles&More points is debatable. Assuming you use Lufthansa or a partner airlines I’ve seen people give values of 1p per point for some flights (which would give me a total of a whopping £2 from this exercise!). However, equally many people are frustrated that in some cases the taxes and fees can actually make Miles&More point redemptions a worse deal than the cash price. On this occasion these 200 points were actually useful to me. This was because I had some existing points in my Miles & More account from the Hilton Lufthansa 25 years promotion (2,500 miles per Hilton stay) and the 200 extra points allowed me to top up to have enough for the next value of shopping voucher. Whilst I only got about 0.3p per point – the Hilton points were acquired ‘free’ in addition to my Honors points on each stay, the Holiday Check points were an experiment and I wasn’t planning on flying Lufthansa any time soon (note they also have a fairly harsh expiry date). So, in exchange for my Google Translate review experiment, I discovered a new points option, unlocked a free shopping voucher and had the beginnings of a blog post. Some method in the madness, perhaps…!

If you’ve identified any quirky ways to secure extra points, let us know in the comments.

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